»MAPS: Electronic and Electroacoustic Resonances between Ecuador and Mexico« was a listening process stemming from an exploration by the artists Concepción Huerta and FE Sexta, where the titular territories become present through a tapestry of sounds, images, connections, feelings, affect, and texts.

FE Sexta (Ecuador) is a cross-disciplinary artist who experiments with the body, moving images, and sound. Their approach originates from imaginative narratives and viscous formats that arise from the immediate future. Concepción Huerta (Mexico) is a sound artist, photographer, and editor who focuses on creating musical stories by interweaving sound and image. Concepción focuses on absence and abstract resonance through tapes and other instruments. Through »MAPS,« the artists sought to unlearn their »Latin American« identity, starting from the context of its electroacoustic and electronic music as well as the history that this region carries. This process was based on the experiences and trajectories of sound artists such as Mesías Maiguashca and Antonio Russek, specifically in their attempts and approaches to sound and its modulation within a diffuse regional/umbrella identity that embraces a mixture of more localised identities and traumas still present since colonisation.

»MAPS« is a process of examining collective memory and a dialogue between bodies and voices that have been forming and finding each other over time. The following essay is a blend of research, interview, contemplation, and reflections in the form of a ghostly voice, whose identity is meant to be individually defined by each reader.

Looking Back and Beyond

Latin American composers have been interested in electro-acoustic experimentation since the advent of this field of sound. The first experiments with electroacoustics in Latin America took place simultaneously in various territories in the mid-1950s.

In most Latin American countries, the first electroacoustic music laboratories were created with many difficulties, with no support from governments and/or institutions – a situation that hasn’t changed much. In Mexico, the first Electronic Music Laboratory came to light in 1970. In Ecuador, the Department of Research and Composition (DIC) was not established until 1987. In Mexico, Antonio Russek, Vicente Rojo, and Roberto Morales were among those who began experimenting with this genre. In 1978, Russek founded the Independent Center for Musical and Multimedia Research (Centro Independiente de Investigación Musical y Multimedia CIIMM).1

»Connecting with Russek's work reminds me to follow a path, but to be disobedient at the same time and venture into the unfathomable, into the limits. To explore and experiment,« says Concepción. »I connected with Russek's work without a need to understand it rationally. I knew it was important to me when I listened to it. Particularly his album Música del Desierto, which he developed in the desert of Coahuila, and which mixes different techniques such as field recordings and electronics. I listened to that CD and I knew I had to write to him.«

The Ecuadorian composer Mesías Maiguashca arrived in Germany in 1966, where he worked at the Electronic Music Studio in Cologne and co-founded the music group Oeldorf. Maiguashca was one of the first to base his sonic practice on an expanded vision, using different media to create and stage music. In a way, he managed to combine the features, worldview, and sound of the peoples of Ecuador with experimental European music.

»As a child, I played in a symphony orchestra. But I was always thinking about the vomit tapes I made – that's what I call the mixes that came from recording over what was recorded – and the sounds of the little toys I built. Listening to Mesías confirmed to me the sonic possibilities that were always there. Hearing his works made sense of my experience and conveyed a certain sense of security,« FE shared.

Latin America is something like this vomit. A vomit that creates something else. »... in Latin America, we have the presence of a natural sensitivity towards ternariness opposed to rhythmic binary – against a torrential flow, sensuality without guilt, and a stubborn modalism,« wrote Coriún Aharonián in his essay »Factors of Latin American Musical Identity after Five Centuries of Conquest, Domination, and Miscegenation« (Uruguay, 1994).

As colonised territories, the borders of Mexico and Ecuador respond more to Western-white political and strategic interests than to their mestizo (mixed race) cultural reality. This, to a large extent, also influences the search for an identity within electroacoustic and electronic music, a need to position oneself in the world through sound. Many composers used indigenous materials in their works. Many processed these materials into something that became appropriation, reappropriation and/or reformulation.